Well, me neither. I was, after all, eleven.
My point is that it created a world that I lived in, for a little while. Historical accuracy had nothing to do with it.
I was in my 20s. It was fine.
Agreed. It might not be great literature, but it was exciting and fun. Knights on horseback, Robin Hood, hidden kings, damsels in distress - it was a rollicking tale of adventure, for a thirteen year-old.
And how many other novels in the early nineteenth century featured a Jewish woman as a sympathetic, heroic character? Rebecca of York was unquestionably the heroine of the novel, and its most admirable character. Even at 13, I knew that Ivanhoe should have ended up with her, rather than that insipid blonde Rowena.
I completely agree on all points. But England was not so enlightened in either Ivanhoe’s or Scott’s time.
No, they’re just more sophisticated readers. I don’t intend that to sound snooty, but people who have read extensively, analyzed writings, etc simply appreciate elements of writing that escape those with less experience. Same with music – Pachelbel’s Canon is a great example, very popular with average people, but people who are more advanced in music appreciation (usually because they’ve listened to a lot more music, maybe play or write music) find it simplistic and trivial. The problem comes when these sophisticated readers forget what it was like to be at entry level & force books on students who aren’t nearly ready to appreciate them.
I’ve never read the book, but the name rang a bell. After looking up the novel on Wikipedia, it turns out that many of the characters, or at least characters with the same names, were used in an old strategy game on the NES called Defender of the Crown. The game was about the war between the Saxons and the Normans for control of England.
I’ve been missing my wife a lot lately and recalled how she would e-say that Therbanteth wrote in Vulgate Latin, not Spanish. 
She tried to teach me Spanish but her Gage Park abuela accent, full of 19th century formality, got in the way.
“Dead or alive, Aethelstane is a bore.”
Richard Armour, The Classics Reclassified.
A Confederacy of Dunces
I read it hoping that someone would murder Ignatius J. Reilly and then we would have a better book.
I’ll drop this here: My introduction to most of the “great books” wasn’t assigned reading; it was Classics Illustrated and movie versions that spurred me to read the originals. Anybody else?
ive noticed over the decades a a type of book thats not really a story … just more like nihilistic observations about segments of society at certain points in time where the observer dosent really make judgements one way or another Now whether its intentional like in Easton Ellis’s less than zero and keuroacs on the road or just happens like in gatsby…
Or they are just burnt out and can’t appreciate the simple good things.
Unreadable and dull, dull dull.
I’ve read both the original and the Classics Illustrated versions of the following novels. I must admit, the latter add a dimension to the stories that made them much more interesting:
The War of the Worlds
The Time Machine
Taras Bulba
Ivanhoe
I read the CI version of Ben Hur and have seen the movie, but have yet to read the novel.
The movie version of Taras Bulba (Yul Brynner, Tony Curtis, Christine Kaufman) was good, but (as with The Grapes of Wrath) Hollywood ended it before the big climax.
I actually read both The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment when I was in grad school, but I enjoyed the movies (one Hollywood, one Soviet) much more.
I might get around to reading War and Peace some day, but I’ve sat through the Soviet movie version so many times I doubt it would hold many surprises for me.
I’ve studied, played, and performed music for years. Pachebel’s Canon is simplistic, yes, in the basic melody; but it’s what you might arrange behind that, that makes every version special. It could be a full orchestra, or a simple duet of flute and guitar. In other words, it’s not Pachelbel’s Canon so much; it’s what you can do with it.
It was a mixture. Some books I first encountered in school, reading parts of them, which spurred me onto the full texts – A Christmas Carol, Gulliver’s Travels, The Odyssey (which we actually read the whole text of, but it lead me on to try to read The Iliad)*
Other books I first encountered in Classics Illustrated and went on to read the real ones . This was especially true of the Jules Verne and H.G. Wells novels – 20,000 Leagues, Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Mysterious Island, First Men in the Moon, From the Earth to the Moon.. Also Frank Buck’s On Jungle Trails. (A lot of the Verne titles they offered weren’t that easy to come by, especially in paperback, like Robur the Conqueror and Master of the World and Tigers and Traitors. I wondered if they might not have been influenced by the ARCO/Fitzroy versions put out circa 1960.
Other books I read because I saw that they were in the Reader’s Digest Condensed Book series, and I didn’t, even at that age, want a diluted book experience. So I read Kon-Tiki and Flight of the Phoenix in the original, non-condensed versions.
*My mother got me the Classics Illustrated version of The Iliad, but she ended up using it more herself. She was taking a night course in English Lit, and the comic book version was easier to follow than the original poem. Or the Cliff’s Notes.
Peter Lorre as Raskolnikov, that’s hard to beat!
I don’t buy that for a minute. That same tired argument is the one that gets trotted out to defend every sort of elitist preference like that- “they’re not sophisticated enough”, “they’re just ignorant rubes”, “their palate isn’t developed enough”. As if somehow being impenetrable, hard to read, and not entertaining is a sign of how sophisticated or good a book is. Same thing for cinema, food, wine, music, etc…
It’s bullshit. I’m not saying there aren’t people out there who like this stuff. What I’m saying is that it’s their opinion, and that just because a certain set of people like something, it doesn’t make the stuff they don’t like “simple” or “unsophisticated”, and conversely, just because something is “sophisticated” and impenetrable, or harsh tasting or whatever, it doesn’t mean that it’s better, or that people who don’t like it aren’t sophisticated. Hell, if you want to look at things like wine, blind tastings have shown that even the most sophisticated wine drinkers can’t really tell wines apart, and certainly not by price level or anything that would indicate they have any more of a clue than anyone else.
I’m not exactly a populist in a whole lot of areas, but this sort of snootiness is one thing that I am definitely populist about. I’m tired of being told that because I don’t like a lot of stuff like “literature” or , that it implies that I’m somehow ignorant or unsophisticated. I read for fun and pleasure. So books I read have to be fun and enjoyable. Not silly or simply written, just entertaining. I don’t like Hemingway for example. Not because he’s a bad writer- far from it. I don’t like him because his stories are generally not entertaining to me. I haven’t enjoyed most art house films I’ve watched either- because they’re not pleasurable or entertaining- that’s why I spend $10 and 2 hours of my life in the movie theater. I’m a little closer on food- I’ve eaten more than my fair share of meals at very expensive places, including Michelin-starred ones, and know what? I still enjoy Chicken McNuggets. And corn dogs. And a big bowl of chili with cornbread on a cold evening. Nothing wrong with any of them, and shame on anyone who claims there is.
That’s my gripe with teaching “great books”- they’re often just flat out not pleasant to read, and I suspect that high school and below English teachers would get a LOT more mileage English-wise out of having students read more contemporary stuff than awful stuff like The Scarlet Letter, The Old Man and the Sea, Silas Marner, Catcher in the Rye, etc… There’s nothing “special” about those books that students couldn’t learn from less classical sources, and in fact, they might be more willing and learn more if the books were more enjoyable.
Case in point- I took a senior-level English literature course in college as a humanities elective. The literature- science fiction and fantasy. Probably the most engaged I’ve ever been, and the most I ever learned about literary themes, etc… Why? Because the stories were actually entertaining in their own right, not just for the sake of the actual writing itself, or because of the motifs or some other stuff like that.
THAT is what I’m talking about- the “great books” aren’t so great, if people don’t enjoy them. The people saying that the books are “great” tend to be somewhat isolated in their own echo chamber where they stroke each other telling themselves how great Hawthorne and Thoreau are, while the rest of the world rolls their eyes and goes back to reading Nora Roberts or George R. R. Martin because they enjoy their writing.
Wait a minute, The Iliad isn’t English Lit!
Re: Pachelbel’s Canon in D:
I suspect Pachelbel himself considered it simplistic and trivial. He’d probably point to his vocal music as his important output. There’s a reason the Canon went largely unnoticed until the 1970s. And speaking as a former cellist, I’m quite happy never to have to play it again.
I mean, it’s a nice piece and I don’t have a problem with people liking it, but it really isn’t “great music” by most metrics.
Pachelbel’s Canon also had the misfortune of being appropriated for a ceaselessly aired TV ad in the 1980s for a “wellness center”. My first wife played flute in several chamber groups and Canon in D was universally referred to by musicians on wedding gigs as “rehab music”.